Tremendous efforts are on going within the nanotechnology field of research in order to both develop new products and understand the behavior of materials at the nano scale. This is a truly cross disciplinary field, involving mechanical, electrical, chemical, and biological areas of interest. One of these fields is the material field studying the behavior of materials at the nano scale, developing new materials, and enhancing material characteristics. In order to be able to work within these new fields new instrumentation is currently being developed.
An interesting and growing research field within the nanotechnology field is mechanical indentation of materials in order to characterize material properties and to understand mechanisms involved in mechanical processes of materials. This is a research field that now is evolving towards the nano area where materials subject to nanoindentation will give answers to many important questions about materials properties at the nano scale. Also today many materials or application of them are only available at the nano scale, such as thin films, nanotubes, fullerenes and so on. Instrumentation are available that enable such experiments where an object of interest is tested on the nano scale; however, the available instrumentation is quite large in volume and can only perform one type of measurement at a time due to this. For instance, the instrument can perform a nanoindentation on the object and then the object need to be transferred to another instrument for analysis of the resulting indentation.
Due to this some instruments have been developed that can view the indentation process with for instance an optical microscope during the indentation process or an atomic force microscope (AFM) after the process.
It is not an easy task with the current state of the art to do nanoindentation measurements on very small structures such as nanotubes. These types of objects can not be localized in a normal microscope instead an electron microscope is one of the best suited tools for observing these structures and objects. However, it is very difficult to do nanoindentation experiments in situ of an electron microscope.
There is a need for a small footprint nanoindentation device that may be used for these types of combined measurements, especially as a combination with a transmission electron microscope (TEM). In this type of combination a powerful tool for the materials researcher is provided, where the instrumentation provide the possibility to indent the object of interest at the nano scale while simultaneously observing the result using the transmission electron microscope. This enables the observation of the dynamic processes involved during the experiment.
MEMS stands for Micro electro mechanical Systems, a manufacturing technology used to produce electromechanical systems using batch fabrication techniques similar to those in IC manufacturing (Integrated Circuits). MEMS integrate mechanical structures, such as sensors and actuators, and electronics on a substrate (e.g. silicon) using micromachining. The idea of using silicon for fabrication of mechanical structures has been around since 1980's due to its outstanding mechanical properties in miniaturized systems. Thanks to the IC industry silicon is produced with very few defects at a low cost. A combination of silicon based microelectronics and micromachining allows the fabrication of devices that can gather and process information all in the same chip. This introduces powerful solutions within for instance automobile production, scientific applications and medical industries.
It is the object of this invention to provide such a nanoindentation device that is small and versatile enough to be Implemented inside a TEM or any other electron microscope device, e.g. scanning electron microscope (SEM).